Former NIGHTCLUB Photographer Nicole Queen's Revert Story

as a child i think i was a more practicing christian and then when i went off to college i kind of grew further away from my faith and i think this is the case for a lot of people when you separate from your home and you go off to college that's the real test of your faith and so i drifted away and um i was brought up a lot of the time with my grandparents who are really devoted christians and we went to church twice a week my grandmother has worked for the church her whole life so we had a really strong foundation in the religion um we were adopted by my mother's sister when i was about eight years old my parents couldn't take care of us because they were drug addicts then when i moved out when i was 17 i got my first apartment and i had a job and i was going to school part-time and then i left that apartment and went off to the university to try to go to school full-time it was really hard i had to pay for everything myself and so it was really difficult and then after school i i just ventured off onto my career path and what i wanted to be i did a lot of partying and stuff in college i was really a good girl going into school and then i just went complete opposite direction and everything changed about me and even when i would visit family and stuff they would they would see me and they would see a different person when i moved out i was a good girl and i had my head straight on what i wanted to do and was very focused and then when i i left the school because of course i wasn't doing any good i wasn't making any good grades i barely would even go to my classes and i um i feel like god even though i was drifting so far away he tried he was you know he never gives up on you and he tried to to keep some kind of hold on me because i i had enough brains to get out and to stop going there and to go back and have my own apartment again and to go back to junior college and just taking it slow and you know finish my courses that i needed to finish and that's what i did and i was able to to kind of snap out of it a little bit but then i um i pretty much just made that part of my lifestyle where i took on a career that was in the nightclub industry because i was so good at that life so i started my own business and i got into event photography and event photography it can be charity events large dinner functions private events at someone's home so um i started to make different contacts and i got into the nightlife of dallas photographing celebrities or high society people at different parties and then the images would get published in magazines later showing that justin timberlake was at this party or timberland was at this club last night so i was involved in in that business and i was the one taking those pictures to show who was who and where were they uh that just led me further into a very materialistic lifestyle it became more glamorous but it was still just about temporary things and um and that was who i was looking up to was these celebrities and these models and these people who had what i thought was the greatest thing the greatest lifestyle and they had so many cars and they had beautiful clothes and they were beautiful people and um i got to just look at them through my lens you know and and that pun was intended like i would just look at them through the lens and see their lives i would see how they were living and what they were doing and everything so um i would look at them and i would i would i would think to myself well no wonder um when you watch tv or something you see all of these celebrities they're always getting divorced uh or they're committing suicide or they're you know going to rehab they're always looking for someone to fix them and really it's just you have to to change your whole life if you want to get fixed and and i started to get pushed over the edge where it was too much of this lifestyle and it was pushing me further and further over the edge you know and it was just in the right point of my life where i was like what else is there you know in this life and i would sit around and talk to friends and we would think we were so smart like what is life all about and we would try to to convince each other this is what life's about that's what life's about but none of us really knew and there was there was one night of course i would get home every night at about 4 00 a.m and that was a normal work schedule for me get home from work at 4 00 am and sleep till noon the next day and go to work at 11 pm i i was hanging out with with friends who were muslim and stuff and we would all get into these discussions too and um one of the people that i had met um at a photo shoot out at one of the events that i was covering was hassan he stuck out like a sore thumb he didn't belong there with these people he didn't drink alcohol you know so he was very uh easy to spot for me because i knew everyone at this place and i didn't know him and i'm like who's this guy and why doesn't he drink why doesn't he act like the other men you know he's not asking for my phone number he's not trying to talk to me and i was used to been treating me like that he and and other people that i had met that were uh like a real muslim you know who practices islam i i would think like well what makes them live that way because they it's kind of like they have something better than what i have like why are you so good that you don't have to drink when the rest of us have to do these things you know we feel like we have to do this so it was a huge curiosity i i would want that peace that they had i would want to feel calm and quiet like they were shy he seemed so different from everyone else and so i think a first thing that attracted me to islam was not the religion it was how a person looked who was a muslim like how you know their demeanor so i think that this was the best uh and i and i like to convey that message to people is that the way that you represent yourself as a muslim it's not about are you wearing a kufi hat and are you saying hey i'm a muslim here's the quran and all of these things i would have been completely turned off if someone did that to me like here's the quran you should change your life sister you should come to god i would have been like blah blah blah i've heard that story plenty of times i i wasn't looking for god and for islam i was looking for calm inner peace and a feeling of purpose and when i found it through islam everything came with it

Channel: Muslim Convert Stories

Views: 606,205

Rating: 4.9284883 out of 5

Keywords: Nicole Queen, muslim convert, new muslim converts 2020, convert to islam 2020, islam revert, islam convert, islam, muslim, 2020, revert, reverted, converted, why i converted, muslim convert stories, convert to islam, revert story, muslim revert, research quran, new muslims, islamic, revert 2020, revert to islam, islam convert story, converted to islam, muslim convert story, religion, accepting islam, nicole queen, nightclub to islam

Id: oYlW7k3YVOo

Length: 7min 19sec (439 seconds)

Published: Mon May 11 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/pennelini]

Mashallah, I love her! She and her friend (also a convert) have a great podcast called Salam, Girl.